Day: July 1, 2019

As a follow up to her first edible sensory tray, today I put together this easy indoor edible sandbox for Veronika… complete with snacks sprinkled in!

Fill a shallow bin with oats, and scatter in a few teething biscuits or toddler cookies (Veronika loves the organic Letter of the Day cookies from Earth’s Best).

Add a few cups or scoops and the bin is ready to go!

Veronika immediately got her hands in, and when she found the first cookie, her look was one of pure delight. Yum!

She kept digging through and loved scattering the oats around.

And she was intrigued when I showed her how she could scoop the mixture into the cups and shake them around, or pour them out.

Big brother wanted in on the action, too!

I loved watching the two of them have fun with this one together.

And because the oats are dry, this sensory bin is remarkably easy to clean up! Have a blanket underneath your baby that you can simply shake into the trash, and anything left behind will sweep up in a pinch.

For today’s tracing letter, Travis and I only used one material, and one that ended with the letter’s sound rather than began with it: chalk, that is!

First he traced upper case K and lower case k on paper. Travis has a difficult time remembering where the two diagonal lines exit out from the straight line, so I knew our 3-D version would be very beneficial today.

I set out three pieces of chalk: 1 long and 2 short.

I challenged him to make big K, angling the chalk pieces correctly. After just a brief pause, he mastered the upper case.

Now for the real trick: could he convert it into lower-case k, moving the chalk pieces only slightly?

Travis loved this month’s craft challenge from Highlights magazine: to make an animal using nothing more than an empty egg carton, pipe cleaners, pom poms, and googly eyes.

I was thinking something cute and fluffy, but Travis immediately knew he wanted a snake! Pipe cleaners were the obvious choice for the body.

We twisted several lengths together to make long snakes. He wanted to attach eyes next, but I asked him if he thought the eyes would affix well to the pipe cleaners. He decided no, and realized an egg carton piece could be the head!

We poked holes through the egg carton segments to attach heads to bodies, and glued on the eyes.

With leftover egg carton portions all around him now, he toyed around with gluing pom poms and eyes to single segments, but this didn’t work very well. Could we use the bigger, lid portion of the carton we wondered, for a body?

Now Travis knew what he wanted: a spider! We threaded four pipe cleaners through from one side to the other, to make 8 legs. He wanted to glue on 8 eyes, but we only had room for 5 eyes to march across.

Then Travis decided it needed to be furry with pom poms – a tarantula! He was so thrilled with this spider that he couldn’t wait for the glue to dry.